


All the Colors Dull

by Lepidopteran (lepi)



Series: A Rusted Gear Begins to Move [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Minimal comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memory Loss, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 13:43:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11968608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepi/pseuds/Lepidopteran
Summary: Prowl's team is dead.  Against all odds, Prowl is alive.  The only logical explanation is that the Decepticons have done something horrible to him.





	All the Colors Dull

**Author's Note:**

> > Wrapped in a ball, all my colors have dulled to gray,  
> My world is falling; my voice will reach you
> 
> -from PROTOTYPE, by niki, translation by reeka6662 

Prowl flickered back online to intense pain and the sensation of energon dripping from vital lines that self-repair hadn't managed to close all the way. His vents hitched in involuntary stutters as he brought his remaining functional optical feed up to assess the damage that his swamped systems couldn't analyze.

The room around him glowed with steady low-level red lights. Some sort of maintenance tunnel? Prowl scrambled to retrieve relevant memories, to organize the mess of insistent notifications pinging him, but whatever had caused his injuries had crashed his system hard enough to cause damage to the most recent memories as well as higher functions. He remembered planning the mission, and he remembered arriving at the disputed outpost with his team before the Decepticons, but beyond that he met with corrupted files and error messages.

His front half felt slick and cold. Pools of energon lay scattered around the room, and energon dripped from the walls. A quick calculation of the volume led Prowl to believe that it couldn't possibly be all his. He couldn't access the precise volume of energon remaining in his tanks and lines, but he still functioned. A strained turn of his head confirmed the hypothesis: he found himself looking at a heap of greyed corpses and brutally dismembered body parts. His fuel pump churned. His team. The chances of anyone in that grotesque pile having survived were infinitesimal. That _he_ had survived was improbably enough.

Light footsteps jolted Prowl into a different sort of awareness, but before he could dim his optic, a small head appeared and peered down at him. Prowl stared at the beastformer—Ravage, Decepticon spy—and realized with another involuntary vent-hitch that the approaching footsteps belonged to Soundwave.

Prowl struggled to activate his suicide coding, but it, like his short-term memory, only spat back an error message that piled on top of the error messages already clogging his systems. His comms didn't work, either. He felt a surge of panic, then calm washed over him. His limbs wouldn't allow him to move; his processor wouldn't let him escape. He met Ravage's silent stare with one of his own. The worst fate he could possibly imagine was this: brutal torture and the forcible scraping of the precious data he carried. He could only hope that death came swiftly, both to himself and the rest of the Autobots.

The footsteps beyond him paused, then resumed until Prowl could feel the vibrations all through his head. Ravage looked up, then placed his claws against Prowl's shoulder.

Prowl felt himself hauled backwards. His vocalizer shorted as the sensation made pain shoot through every one of his sensors. One of his doorwings lay crushed beneath his shoulder at an impossible angle, and Ravage's tugging had twisted it further. Prowl stared up at the ceiling. He only felt the pain; the panic had fled, leaving behind only emptiness. He barely felt like Prowl anymore.

Soundwave stared down at him, then glanced at Ravage. "Prowl is damaged."

Ravage gave a huff. His claws twitched over Prowl's chest plating, right over the spark. "Did you expect to find differently? Crasher rarely leaves her marks alive." Disdain crept into his voice. His _voice_. Of course Soundwave's Cassettes would be sapient. "We should be grateful she left this one in good enough shape to hack."

Prowl's whole body shuddered, and his optic fuzzed. He didn't understand; neither his visual cortex nor that optic were among the many systems sending errors. Why did the ceiling suddenly look grey and static-filled? Was Soundwave hacking him already? Prowl had never encountered a technopath face-to-face before, and reports on Soundwave's capabilities remained distressingly vague. Prowl's vents gave a painful, jolting hiccup. He found himself trying his suicide codes again, though of course repeated attempts would not change the outcome.

There was nothing Prowl could do except lie there and wait for the torture to begin.

One of Soundwave's hands slid around the back of Prowl's neck. The claws of the other moved down Prowl's chest, towards his hips. Prowl thought for an instant that Soundwave intended to go in the most direct route, through Prowl's interface ports, and his already-fuzzy optical feed dissolved entirely into static. The thought of Soundwave forcing his cord into ports slicked only by energon, ripping his secrets out… But before Prowl could panic again, Soundwave's claws tapped his abdominal armor once to shift a bit of misaligned plating and moved back up to the medical port cover by his shoulder. The manual hatch flicked open without any pain, and a slim medical cord clicked into place without any charge exchange.

"Well?" Ravage said after a moment, flicking his bladed tail from side to side. "How damaged is he? If you intend to hack him, we should probably patch him up and get him in stasis cuffs."

Prowl couldn't feel anything. He didn't know what parts of himself Soundwave was accessing. It could be anything; the most intimate memories or the most confidential secrets. Soundwave could be planting code in him, could be doing anything, and Prowl would never know—

Soundwave made a soft noise, and the pain coming from Prowl's sensory network abruptly stopped. He could still feel the uncomfortable slide of energon from slices and tears in his tubing, but he no longer hurt. A moment later, Soundwave's medical cord withdrew, and slim claws latched the cover back into place. "Buzzsaw, eject. Operation: repair Autobot Prowl."

"Eject Laserbeak as well and have em get the stasis cuffs," Ravage said. "Not that I believe the Autobot tactician fool enough to try anything. I'd prefer not to take my chances."

"No stasis cuffs," Soundwave said. "Repair Prowl."

Enough static faded from Prowl's optic that he could make out Buzzsaw's shape as the Cassette landed on his chest. Buzzsaw had eir head craned as ey looked up at Soundwave. After an indeterminate period of time—thanks to a faulty chrono—Buzzsaw blatted a harsh sound and jittered eir wings. "If you say so, _Boss,_ " ey said in a snide tone. "But if you don't think Megatron is going to have words with you about this—"

Soundwave cut em off. "Repair. Prowl."

Prowl waited for the pain to return as Buzzsaw shuffled around, eir talons leaving scraps as ey leaned in to pinch and gum the leaking lines. Buzzsaw was certainly no medic. From what Prowl had gleaned from the minimal pre-war records kept on mechanimals, Buzzsaw's knowledge of anatomy would have to have come from assassination and combat—nothing that would place value on care for the subject's comfort.

The pain never came, though. Buzzsaw leaned forward and tapped eir beak against Prowl's crushed optic once, then twice before looking up at Soundwave. "Can't fix anything else without tools. What now?"

Soundwave's hand finally slid away from Prowl's neck. "Buzzsaw, return."

"Really?" Buzzsaw grumbled. Ey winced. "Yeah, yeah, I get it."

"Hey, Boss?" came a new voice. Prowl's database identified it as belonging to either Rumble or Frenzy, but the twins didn't have enough vocal differentiation in Cassette form to make a clear analysis. "Flamewar wants to know how long you're going to take down here. She's waiting for your report."

Soundwave looked down at Prowl, then back up at Ravage. "Remove evidence," he said. "Autobot Prowl escaped."

"What?! You really—"

"Boss!"

Soundwave pushed to his feet. "Time is limited," he said. "Frenzy, assist."

"Next time, Rumble can come out, and I'll stay in your dock," Frenzy grumbled, but he approached Prowl and grabbed none too gently at his legs as Soundwave's footsteps vanished from the room. "This is the worst job in the history of ever."

"You exaggerate." Ravage leaned down into Prowl's face again, baring serrated blades that passed for dental plates. "Listen to me, Autobot. You are going to be very quiet and obedient for the next breem, or you are going to find yourself very unhappy. You still have all your limbs attached…for now."

Frenzy chortled and began to drag Prowl's body in an impressive display of strength. Prowl tensed, expecting a repeat of the shrieking pain that his broken doorwing had caused, but Soundwave's anesthetic persisted. "Ha! You're not gonna be a fussy caretaker like the Boss?"

Ravage looked up at his fellow Cassette. "Frenzy, I am never anyone's caretaker." He moved back to begin nudging Prowl forward with his head.

Prowl, still dazed, watched the ceiling as it changed. Red lighting to the neutral white lighting of a wide maintenance hatch, then a large room through which Prowl could hear indistinct talking—muffled as though by distance—and finally out into the natural lighting of Cybertron's sun. Prowl turned his head to the side to try to get a sense of what direction they were moving in, but the bumps and scrapes of being dragged disoriented his navcom. Focusing on it sent his sensors into a temporary tizzy, and he found himself forced to give up. He dimmed his optic instead, letting the Cassettes maneuver him where they would.

"Here?" Frenzy said after some time, dropping Prowl's leg like so much scrap metal. "This has gotta be far enough, right?"

Ravage huffed. "Yes, this is far enough."

Frenzy came up to Prowl's face and tapped his cheek plating. "This still doesn't feel right, lettin' an Autobot go like this. Especially Prowl."

"He won't remember," Ravage said. "Would I be speaking aloud if he would? You don't have to understand why Soundwave is doing this. Come on, let's hurry back."

"That's not exactly what I meant," Frenzy muttered, but he trotted after Ravage, and then Prowl heard nothing but silence.

* * *

Prowl came online all at once and stared up at strong lights in a room he didn't recognize. "Oh—easy there," said a voice he couldn't place for a moment. Decepticon? Prowl glanced over in the direction of the voice and relaxed at the sight of Ratchet's newly-adult assistant. Minerva. "Your optic is working again, but there's a lot of structural damage that's going to take a while to heal Try not to break the stasis beams."

"I will not." Prowl relaxed back and stared up at the ceiling. "What happened to me?"

"You don't remember?" Minerva grimaced. "I shouldn't be surprised; you sustained heavy cranial damage." She held a datapad in front of Prowl's face. "Here. Ratchet says you like to see the complete damage report?"

Prowl beeped an affirmative as his optics scanned the list. Damaged processor, arms crushed, chest armor ripped through nearly to the spark, an interface port ripped clean out, scratches all over his front and scuff marks all over his back. Leg struts broken, crushing damage to the head and optic. One doorwing ripped nearly in two and melted to his frame, the other doorwing strained and crushed. He'd been very effectively put out of commission and possibly hacked. "And the rest of my team?"

"Prowl, you're awake!" Jazz's voice exclaimed from some distance away, and whatever answer Minerva might have given was lost. Jazz slid up to the medical slab where Prowl lay and leaned over him with a smile. "Hey, how're you feelin'?"

Prowl glared at him. "What happened to the rest of my team?"

Jazz's smile dimmed, though it didn't vanish. "You don't remember?"

"No," Prowl said. "My cranial damage was too severe to retain those memories."

Jazz's visor glinted, and Prowl felt a ping from his comm system. «Let's not scare the nice medic,» Jazz said. «Here's the situation, Prowl. I found you lying on a crystal formation half a mile from the outpost you should have been commanding. None of your team were there, but I found scuff marks like you'd been dragged. You woke up and asked me the exact same thing you're askin' now, and the answer hasn't changed: from what Chromia can tell me, none of your team are comin' back alive.»

«Except me,» Prowl said.

«Except you,» Jazz said.

Prowl let himself take a few nanokliks to process that, then spoke aloud. "What virus scans have been done?"

Jazz glanced at Minerva, who looked up from where she'd been checking Prowl's readout screen. "All the standard scans. Deeper scans need an expert and a healthy subject. Prowl—"

"Do it."

"—you have to wait." Minerva looked down at the floor. While Ratchet had obviously been coaching her on how to handle superior officers, she lacked the easy authority of a more experienced medic. "I'm sorry."

Jazz sighed and reached out to rest a hand on Prowl's shoulder. Prowl couldn't twitch away, trapped as he was by the stasis beams, and he had no way to verbalize the immediate non-physical discomfort the warm weight sent through him. "We're not gonna let you at anything sensitive until Ratchet's had a chance to check you. Don't worry. All the access codes are changed, too; I sent word as soon as I found you."

Prowl nodded and began a systems check of his own to compare against the damage report from the medics. Jazz squeezed his shoulder and let go. Visual cortex functioning at suboptimal levels. Strut weakness. Memory damage. Suicide code damage. Prowl frowned and sent a comm to Jazz. «My suicide codes haven't been re-enabled. That should have been an easy repair.»

«Prowl, do you really think OP's gonna authorize suicide coding?» Jazz replied with a strange melancholy underlying his words. «He's as close to an idealist as a Prime can get. He wants to win this war with minimal loss of life.»

A rush of panic washed through Prowl, followed by the soothing numb of logic. «Optimus Prime is not the only mechanism with the authorization for suicide coding.»

Jazz stared down at him with his facial plating set. «No. He's not. But you already know how high your permissions are set. And the only way that's gonna change—»

«I understand,» Prowl said before Jazz could complete that sentence. He lay there, immobile and helpless, possibly infected by a deadly Decepticon virus, and pondered the scenario that Jazz proposed: consensual hacking. Was it worth the invasion for the suicide coding? No, he decided, but there was another solution. «Have Optimus give me the option to erase, then. You know how vital my information is to the survival of the Autobots.»

«You are far too eager to go around and off yourself in some way or another, mech,» Jazz said. «I'll talk to him. I won't promise anything more than that.»

* * *

Among all the other injuries, Prowl's chronometer had been damaged, which meant that his only method of gauging how much time had passed was the faint, intermittent beeps from the medical equipment. They told him nothing: he had no way of establishing how long the space between each beep _was_ , and he kept sliding into medical recharge. He could have been lying on the slab for joors or orns by the time he awoke to find his system repairs complete.

Ratchet stood by the slab, his optics dim and fixed on Prowl's face. "I hear you had Jazz speak to Optimus."

"I've been compromised," Prowl said. "In order to remain valuable to the war effort, I need to take precautions. Am I healthy enough to run the deepest virus scans?"

"We ran those while you were in recharge," Minerva's voice said from across the room, and Prowl turned his head sharply in time to see her smile at him. "You're clean! Congratulations. You were really lucky."

Ratchet still wore a grim expression on his faceplates. He hadn't moved his optical sweep away from Prowl. "Minerva, could we have some privacy? Take care of any mechs that come in and comm me if there's an emergency."

"Okay?" Minerva stepped backwards towards the door in an uncertain motion. "Are you sure—"

"Minerva."

"Right. I'll comm you if— Sir." She glanced over at Prowl, then turned all at once and left.

Prowl felt curiously distant, as though his coding patches had begun to work. They hadn't; this was how he was _supposed_ to feel all the time. If he could train himself to feel this way, he wouldn't need the coding patches anymore. "Are you sure the scans came back clean, considering the circumstances in which I was found?"

"They're clean." Ratchet set his fingers on the edge of the slab. "There's no need to worry about that. But any coding alterations need to be authorized by a medical expert as well, and I'm the ranking physician on this vessel. Prowl—"

"I know what I'm asking for," Prowl said before Ratchet could get started. "I am aware of the risks and potential consequences. Ideally, the Prime would authorize my suicide coding repair so that the risk wouldn't be an unintentional system wipe—"

"So the risk would be accidental spark termination instead! Great!" Ratchet flung both hands up in an explosive motion and turned away from Prowl. "Damn it, Prowl, this is exactly what I was worried about."

"There's no reason to be worried." But Prowl could feel the faint pangs of emotion threatening to break through the calm he'd somehow achieved before. He needed to be reasonable. Logical. "I understand that if we weren't in the middle of a war this might seem—"

 _"Prowl."_ His name barreled out of Ratchet's vocalizer like a fired shot. Ratchet grabbed a nearby table and gripped it so hard his fingers creaked. "Do us both a favor and don't finish what you were about to say."

Over-emotionality impressed no one, Prowl least of all. "We're in the middle a war," he repeated, flattening his voice to emphasize the stark reality of the situation. "I hold information too valuable to trust the _good intentions_ of the Decepticons. If they had any _good intentions_ , the war would not have started to begin with. My team would not be dead. I would not have been injured and hacked." Ratchet made a low noise, so Prowl raised his voice and continued to speak. "I understand that Optimus has a delusion that the Decepticons will _not_ fight brutally and without mercy. He is new to his position. He'll learn. Until he is willing to accept the realities of war, I need to protect the Autobots for him. No matter the cost."

"Damn it, Prowl," Ratchet said again, his voice softer now. "You none of us want this."

" _I_ want this." Prowl stared at the back of Ratchet's helm. "For someone who talks so much about autonomy and free will, you're quick to deny mine."

"You're slagging impossible," Ratchet growled. He turned around, his medical cord bared and gleaming, and for just a moment Prowl felt himself flinch in a full-body shudder. It made no sense to react that way. Ratchet wasn't a Decepticon. He would neither install viruses nor hack Prowl's systems. Prowl's virus scan had come up clean.

But he didn't _feel_ clean.

He pushed the crawling sensation away and bared his medical port. His gaze settled on the ceiling as Ratchet clicked into place. "I'm putting safeguards in," Ratchet said. "Before you argue that this defeats the purpose, let me assure that _any_ coding can be damaged or altered. And thank slagging Primus for that, because we weren't getting that suicide coding out of you otherwise."

Prowl's doors scraped painfully against the slab as they twitched in sluggish reaction. He could feel coding sliding into place. He'd resigned himself to the inferiority of data erasure after the conversation with Jazz. Jazz was right, as usual: there was no way Prowl would have been able to convince Optimus Prime to go against his own foolish war-damaging values to make the decisions it would take to win. Sentinel had been their best hope. If only Prowl had realized that Megatron would risk his own safety to go after Sentinel directly— if only he'd been there to buy time for Sentinel by using his body as a shield—

He hadn't been programmed to die for his Prime, even if he'd been in a position to do so. Would he have made that decision in time, or would his processing have stalled? He'd known from the moment he saw energon pouring from the hole in Sentinel's chest that they'd lost the chance to crush the Decepticons once and for all. And the remains of the Council, the fools, had chosen Optimus as a scapegoat rather than risk any of their own lives. They hadn't had the courage to accept the Matrix, and so the Autobots had been condemned to a slow, painful war under the leadership of Optimus Prime.

Ratchet's medical cord clicked out of Prowl's port, and Prowl pulled himself back into the present. "Is it complete?"

"Almost. You'll need to visit Optimus and Jazz for the final authorization codes." Ratchet's optics, if anything, had dimmed further despite the suppressed emotion Prowl could hear under his voice. "But you've got a clean bill of health. Get out of my medical bay and don't let me see you again for a while. And if you erase your own data—"

Prowl ended the conversation by pulling himself upright and moving out of the medical bay as soon as the stasis beams were deactivated. Ratchet didn't follow him. «Prowl to Optimus Prime,» he said crisply. «Requesting data erasure activation authorization as soon as possible.»

«Hello, Prowl. So you decided to go through with it after all.» Optimus' voice sounded heavy, which made no sense. Of course Prowl wouldn't prioritize his own memories over the Autobot cause. He hadn't been made for that. «I'm free now, if you wish to come to my hab suite.»

Prowl's hesitation at those words lasted barely a nanoklik. «Of course,» he said. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could return to more comfortable tasks, like analyzing the circumstances of his injury and rescue. «I will be there right away.»

«On second thought,» Optimus said, «let's meet in my office. I was just about to head there anyway. I have work to do.»

«Of course.»

None of this situation made any sense. His virus scans had come back clean: why? If he had been left alive on purpose, after the information had been brutally hacked from him, there had to be a reason. He was, for the time being _safe_ , and yet he didn't know why. The further he progressed down the corridor, the more he felt as though something more severe than incapacitating injury must have happened to him. That would be the only logical conclusion. His vents came harder. His fans threatened to click on. The crawling sensation under his plating intensified. He resisted the urge to run back to the medical bay and demand that Ratchet run another deep scan while Prowl remained awake to supervise. Had the Decepticons finally managed to create a virus that would go undetected? If they had, Prowl would be the best target for it, given his involvement in every movement of the Autobot forces. Perhaps the right thing to do would be to activate the erasure code as soon as he obtained the authorization from Optimus and Jazz, just in case.

But Ratchet must have predicted that. Even with authorization, the coding could only be activated manually during a deep and nonconsensual hack, and the chances of Prowl being able to mastermind that just to eliminate the _possibility_ of an undetectable virus were minimal at best. Jazz would notice. Jazz would stop him until there was clear evidence of a leak.

So the best course of action would be to obtain the authorizations and wait until the virus showed itself. Surely it would manifest in time, and he would keep himself distant from the planning for a few more orns. After that, he would do as he had been raised and coded to do: he would do his best to ensure victory for the Autobots, even when the Prime himself would not.

They would all understand someday. Prowl let out a quick rush of overheated air, raised his chin, and flattened his wings against his back so that they wouldn't shake. He was ready to face the Prime.


End file.
